Uncover - S14: "Boys Like Me" E5: Welcome to the Manosphere

Episode Date: January 3, 2022

Incels are only part of the threat. Ellen speaks with a woman who spent years undercover among a vast network of online communities — among them so-called mens’ rights activists and pickup artists — all united in their desire for total male supremacy. They orchestrate harassment campaigns, glorify violence against women and actively recruit vulnerable young men. Few people are talking about it. And no one knows how to stop it. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/boys-like-me-transcripts-listen-1.6732152

I'm David Ridgen, host of the award-winning podcast Someone Knows Something. Each season I investigate a different unsolved case, from a mysterious bomb hidden in a flashlight to two teenagers killed by the KKK. The New York Times calls SKS a consistently rigorous intelligent gem, and Esquire named the series one of the best true crime podcasts of 2021. Find Someone Knows Something wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. This episode contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault.

Please take care. Last night, police received multiple calls at 6.11 to an address in Biddick Drive. The number of calls were considerable and were assessed and it was later revealed that shops were being fired. It is our understanding and I confirm that a man known as Jake Davison, aged 22, had murdered a woman at an address in Biddick Drive using a firearm. I've had this growing sense of unease for a long time, since before I started working on the series. It's sort of like a low-grade buzz.

Davison shot and killed his mother. grade buzz. Davison shot and killed his mother. He then went onto the road and fired again killing three-year-old Sophie Martin and her father Lee. I think it comes from the fact that we're constantly exposed to extreme violence and misogyny, whether we realize it or not. The gunman then headed into a nearby park, shooting and injuring another man and woman. In the park, he killed 59-year-old Stephen Washington before heading to Henderson Place,

where he shot his fifth victim, 66-year-old Kate Shepard, who later died in hospital. The weird thing is, you get used to it. It sort of blends in with the background, so you don't notice it. It becomes white noise. And most of the time, you just tune it out. It was here that the gunman then shot himself and was declared dead at the scene. Once in a while, something like the van attack happens, and you notice it again. And you think, this is wrong.

This is fucked up. We've got to fix it. Online, Jake Davison was involved in the incel or involuntary celibate subculture of people who resent their lack of a sexual partner. In one message he posted, he spoke of feeling beaten down and defeated by life. And then a couple of weeks go by

and the buzz fades away again, until the next time something terrible happens. I've gotten used to the facts of the Toronto Fan Attack. For the better part of three years now, I've been repeating, Alec Manassian, kill 10 people and injured 16 more, like some sort of grim mantra. As I repeated it, the buzzing started to fade. But the other morning, I woke up and checked my email. There was a message in my inbox from one of my producers. The subject line was, 11th victim of the van attack.

One of the people Manassian struck was a 65-year-old woman named Amoresh Tesfamarium. She was injured in the attack and had remained in hospital ever since. On October 28, 2021, she died of complications from those injuries. Amoresh Tesfamuriam's death has brought that buzzing back. I haven't gotten used to it yet. I haven't gotten used to saying that on April 23rd, 2018, Alec Manassian killed 11 people and injured 15 more. killed 11 people and injured 15 more. I'm Ellen Chloe Bateman. This is Boys Like Me.

My first inclination was, oh, if I was interested in Ellen, like, I would definitely try and join your social networks now. This is Earl Fishel. So yeah, knowing who's in there is important because there is a lot of information. Even in just photos themselves, there's lots of good information. Earl used to work in cryptology for the government of Canada. Now he's with a private company called Field Effect, which specializes in IT security. What kind of information would you find in someone's photos? The geolocation information, you know, like a certain photo sharing sites, you know, make it

really easy to see a lot, like what camera took the photo and stuff like that. That's all captured, not always, but often as part of like photo metadata. Anyway, so that kind of stuff is there. But then also just seeing the picture can be revealing. This all sounds very sinister, of course, but you know, it's very easy to take someone's photo and then go do like reverse image searches for it and see where else you can find them. I've known for a while that I might end up the victim of a coordinated online threat campaign. I might get doxxed. That means rape threats texted to my phone and living with the knowledge that people have my home address. So Earl's been helping me do what I can to protect

myself. I didn't really find anything to, nothing that made me worry or anything like that for sure. I didn't really find anything to nothing that made me worry or anything like that. Sure. The one thing that I was interested in asking if that was right was there was a couple of links I found related to like renovations, like like a web image gallery of like bathroom renovations. And I wasn't sure if that might be the you, Ellen Bateman, or a different Ellen Bateman. It probably is me.

There's a recent UNESCO report called The Chilling. It talks about how women journalists around the world are under attack. In particular, it found that women who research and report on issues of gender and misogyny are increasingly being hacked and doxxed. Threats of physical violence and sexual assault are also common, and sometimes those threats are made real. Globally, one in five women surveyed said they'd experienced attacks or abuse in the real world as a result of their online work.

Is the house on, oh, we shouldn't say the street name then. I don't know if you bought that house or not, but the gallery has the street name in it. Okay. So yeah. Is that the house you're in right now? It's the house I'm in right now. Yeah. I've spoken to other women who have worked on stories like this one, or who have done academic research about toxic online communities. Some of them are scared and would only speak with me off the record, or with a promise that we'd use a pseudonym. Some have left public life, moved to the country,

and started getting their mail from P.O. boxes. Some have had their kids' lives threatened. There's been a real barrage and an uptick in rape threats, abuse, death threats, but these are all things that I lived with already. This is Laura Bates. The scariest thing I would say that's happened since the book came out has been people trying to find me,

which again was something that I anticipated, so I was very careful before the book came out has been people trying to find me, which again was something that I anticipated. So I was very careful before the book was published to take a number of security steps to protect my location and my family's identity and locations. She's talking about what happened after she published a book called Men Who Hate Women. It came out in 2020. after she published a book called Men Who Hate Women. It came out in 2020. It's about her experiences posing as a young boy named Alex and going undercover in misogynist online communities. After it was revealed that I'd gone undercover on these websites

to research the book, some of the platforms that I had been a member of were then there were people on them posting pictures of themselves with knives or swords or weapons and saying things like, okay, which one of you fuckers is Laura Bates? That kind of thing. Internet threats weren't a new thing for Laura. She'd been dealing with them since 2012 when she launched a website called the Everyday Sexism Project. Her idea was to create a space where women could share stories about everything from workplace harassment to sexual assault.

Like thousands of other women, I've spent hours on the site, seeing my own experiences reflected in their stories. And so I started talking to other women, women that I knew, women I'd just met, older women, younger women, and just saying, you know, have you ever experienced anything like this? And I honestly thought that maybe one or two people would say, oh yeah, you know, maybe five years ago this happened to me,

or I once had this thing, I had a job where this happened. And it could not have been more different. Every woman I spoke to had a story, but it wasn't just one. It was, oh yeah, on my way to meet you today this happened. Yeah, like most days at work, this happened. The launch of the site is considered the start of a new wave of feminism. Feminism in the digital age. And it sowed the seeds for the Me Too movement.

Shortly after launching the site, Laura started perceiving graphic rape threats all at once, all using similar language. She wasn't sure what was happening, but it felt like an organized assault. And for years, she was hesitant to talk about it. For a long time, there was this argument that we shouldn't give them the oxygen of publicity. And I think I sympathized with that argument to a great degree. You know, that seemed fairly valid. So I didn't talk about them really for about eight years.

But what changed for me was that I regularly work in schools with young people. I visit an average of around two schools a week in non-pandemic times. So I see thousands of young people every year. And I noticed a huge and really worrying shift in the last couple of years in the responses of the young people I was working with, the boys in particular, that there was an entrenched hostility, a kind of hardened resistance that just hadn't been there before, which isn't to say it had been a walk in the park. There's always some resistance and some confusion and awkward conversations and difficulty and arguments when you have these conversations in schools about sex and relationships and consent that's to be expected but this was different these were boys arriving um openly

saying why should i listen to what some feminist man-hating bitch has to say these were boys who genuinely had been indoctrinated to believe that there is a feminist conspiracy at the heart of our government that white men are under attack and need to fight back, that the vast majority of rape allegations are false, that men are the vast majority of victims of domestic abuse, that women in short skirts are sluts who are asking for it. There was a real ingrained nature to these beliefs. It was very difficult to reach them. It was very difficult to engage them in conversation or to even begin to challenge these ideas. And that kind of total refusal

to even entertain alternative viewpoints is very much a hallmark of radicalization. She started to notice that boys from rural Scotland were citing the same fake stats as boys in inner-city London. And this was happening wherever she went in the UK. And the more I talked to these boys and the more I started asking them where their information was coming from, I started hearing names of men who are prominent in these online communities. Names from the manosphere. The manosphere. I didn't know anything about it until I started digging into Alec Manassian's online world.

It's an online ecosystem of forums, websites, groups, blogs, social media platforms, and YouTube channels. It includes incels, pickup artists, and a lot more. If the red pill is the ticket, then the manosphere is the destination. I started off in gaming forums and chat rooms and kind of generic forums, places where you wouldn't necessarily expect to stumble across any of this stuff, bodybuilding forums. Laura's time embedded in the manosphere as Alex showed her how subtly radicalization can happen. And it was a really gradual process to let him, to let myself really slide down this very slippery slope that started with just tidbits, with people throwing out casual comments as you're gaming or

suggesting a link that you might want to look at in the comment on a chat. And from there, the YouTube algorithm sends you off on a kind of spiral into other stuff. And suddenly you're learning that the gender pay gap is a myth and that actually men everywhere are losing their jobs because of spurious allegations of sexual harassment. And that takes you into a men's rights website where you suddenly learn all these statistics that you never knew about. And you kind of start to recognize that you're being red-pilled. The manosphere is enormous, but there are a few major communities at its center. The most notorious is probably pickup artists. It's an international industry that's almost completely unregulated and valued at around

$100 million. Men all over the world are paying thousands upon thousands of dollars to learn how to turn no's into yes's, to harass women into submission, and in the most egregious cases, to justify sexual assault. These are thousands of websites, boot camps, training courses where men are taught things like how to physically touch and get into the bedroom of a woman who doesn't want them to. They have terminology like overcoming what they call LMR or last minute resistance. In other words, forcing a woman into having sex with you once she's actually said no. And the leading lights of this so-called industry are men who have themselves boasted about rape or argued for it to be legalized. I recently published a proposal called How to Stop Rape. And that suggests that if we legalize rape, women will be more careful

with their bodies and not go into the private rooms of men that they don't want to have sex with. Pickup artists are just one element of the manosphere and a popular gateway into it. And then you have men's rights activists, a group who claim to care deeply about real issues affecting men, whether that might be veterans' rights or workplace injury or parental custody arrangements. But these are in fact groups that in some cases advocate violence against women and focus the majority of their energy, their time and their financing on trying to attack and undermine women and feminism in particular. Our society still conditions women to see men as machines designed and built to serve the lives of women. Indeed,

the exploitation of men is exactly what feminists count on, or they wouldn't even exist. Then there are men going their own way. This is a group of men, they call themselves MGTOW for short, that's the acronym M-G-T-O-W. These are men who believe that women are so toxic and so dangerous that they should simply be avoided altogether. Women are made out to be harmless, beautiful creatures. But the truth is many women today will rip out your heart and testicles through your wallet. And the sooner men realize this, the sooner they can go their own way. And of course, there are incels.

It's too late. I'm not a young person anymore. I still can't get a girlfriend. I can't even get a date. I'll always be broken from missing out. And I'll only get more and more broken. Certainly I would say that the incel community is probably the most vitriolic of the manosphere communities. I'd say it's the one that most openly incites sexual and physical violence towards women and most openly encourages people to go offline and carry out those attacks. So in that case, I would say that it makes it the most problematic. I think what unifies all of them

is very much a hatred of women, a kind of nostalgic hearkening back to a simpler time when they perceive men to have been in control of politics, of family life, of everything really, and women to have been quiet, submissive, docile, domestic. And it's really important to recognize that that sort of nostalgia for a perceived period that didn't necessarily ever really exist is also very much shared with white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Laura believes we need to be paying closer attention to this. Events like the van attack are heinous, they're violent, they're beyond our comprehension, but they're also a distraction from the subtle creeping effects of the manosphere as a whole. the subtle, creeping effects of the manosphere as a whole.

If you look at the number of people affected, you could argue that the men's rights movement or the pickup artist industry is the most problematic because of the ways in which they leak offline without us necessarily even noticing it. So if you look at these pickup artist forums suddenly, you realize that

we have got tens of thousands of people, particularly of teenage boys, being groomed into sexual harassment techniques from an incredibly young age. And there are cases where women have traced the details of their rape and men have been jailed as a result, back to those pickup artist websites. But I would imagine that in far more cases women experience rape sexual assault sexual harassment sexual violence in their daily lives without ever knowing or uncovering that the ideology that might have led somebody to behave in that way towards them actually may have either emerged or been

encouraged by their membership of pickup forums so I think that's a more kind of covert threat in terms of the way in which it might be kind of sullying things without us recognizing it. And you could really say the same about the men's rights movement, which, again, is kind of extremely effective in turning boys and young men against feminism, mainstream feminist arguments and basically working in opposition to relationships and sex education in schools that's teaching boys to, you know, offer basic respect and dignity to women. We tend to focus on the ideological part of this anti-feminist rhetoric. And that's definitely part of it. A lot of the vitriol and violence in the manosphere is motivated by misogynistic beliefs.

But often, it's just not that well thought out. A lot of the time, the guys making rape threats are doing it for the lulz. They're trolling. There might be men who are specifically kind of trolls operating within these groups, or you might see members of these groups using so-called trolling tactics, like brigading, for example, or astroturfing. Like dogs saying, brigading and astroturfing are highly organized types of online harassment. It means flooding women's inboxes and social media accounts with taunts and threats,

shutting down their websites, writing damaging reviews of their work, threatening them through texts and phone calls. Laura experienced a lot of this, and I was worried that the same might be in store for me. It's not like I found any compromising anything about Ellen, so, but it wouldn't be super difficult to try and learn more about you based on what's there. Whether I could get enough information to contact you directly or find you physically, you know, unfortunately, that's usually just a matter of like time and investment in trying to get it done. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news.

So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts.

After months of pretrial hearings, Alec Manassian's trial began on November 10th, 2020. That Alec Manassian was the man behind the wheel, that he planned and executed the deadly Toronto van attack, is not in dispute. The only question before the court, is he criminally responsible? Because of the pandemic,

the trial was almost entirely virtual. The judge, the attorneys, and the press were all connected over a video link. But there was an exception. There was a room at the courthouse for victims and their families. Kathy Riddell was there. I sat with a family whose daughter was killed on that street that day. You'll remember Kathy. You've heard from her before. She was struck by the van and thrown into a glass bus shelter.

I just felt absolutely horrible that I was there and a survivor and their daughter was dead. It's something that I'll probably never, never totally get over. Kathy spent three months in a hospital and still hasn't fully recovered. Given my background and the fact that I'd been physically active all my life, never expect it to end up this way. And there is only one person to blame for that. She learned a few details while she was in hospital.

But she has no recollection of the attack itself. And I really didn't get a full picture of what happened until the first day of trial. And then I got an eyeful and an earful. Maybe a little too much. It was very hard to deal with then. And I think I went through my trauma at that time. The trial began with a lengthy presentation by Crown attorneys that included photos and video of the attack's aftermath.

We saw that hour and a half video at the beginning, which was absolutely devastating. I'm still having nightmares about that because they showed every single person being injured. They read out all the major incidents that happened to them, which hospital they went to, what the coroner's report was. It was gruesome. It was beyond gruesome. It's one thing to see what happened to yourself but it's

another to share that experience with someone who's losing a child on screen. Just horrendous. I wish they kind of wish they hadn't done it that way or warned us that that was going to happen. I think I might have stayed away that day but that's the way it went and at least I know everything now. Funny thing is, it still didn't trigger a memory. It's sort of bizarre. And I probably will never have one now, which is fine. After what I saw, who wants to remember it?

Evan and I watched the trial together at a public viewing gallery that had been set up in downtown Toronto. There was a lot at stake in the trial. First and foremost, the need for victims and the families of victims to feel like justice had been served.

And then the ripple effects. What message would it send to incels and other online groups? And how would the verdict affect the autism community? This is something Evan had been thinking about for a long time. So, do I think that autism will be a factor in this trial? No. will be a factor in this trial? No, because autism has never really driven someone

to hurt someone intentionally. You know, there's more than enough evidence to strong suggest that this was all premeditated. So I cannot see how autism would be the deciding factor in his mental state of mind. It might factor into how impressionable he was, but this is all conjecture at this point. I don't know. But it became clear on the first day of trial that Manassian's autism would be the central issue. His team was mounting an NCR defense. That's short for not criminally responsible due to a mental disorder.

They were asserting that the severity of Alex's autism meant that he couldn't be held responsible for the attack. I'm like, you know what? No, no, no. There's way too much that doesn't fit here. That is just an excuse. I'm not going to accept that. I can't and I don't think any, I don't think anybody with a real conscience can accept that that he did that because of autism.

He did not do it because of autism. He wanted to outdo some of the mass killers of the states, which he had studied. So this isn't like something that just came out of the blue. This was something he'd been thinking about a long time, and he was smart enough to hide it from everybody. The Toronto van attack trial, it continues this morning with the defense calling... There was no argument about what Alec had done. The issue was whether or not he could be held responsible. Alec Manassian's father finished testifying today, mostly defending against prosecution suggestions that he was exaggerating his son's autism traits.

For the next five and a half weeks, experts on both sides debated Manassian's ability to determine right from wrong. Psychiatrist Alexander Westphal testified that in his conversations with Manassian about the attack, there was no emotion whatsoever, no regret, no remorse. Those in attendance heard the confessed killer describe the attack in a, quote, cold, clinical manner. Crown witness and forensic psychiatrist Dr. Scott Woodside disagrees and says Manassian's own words prove that. Manassian spoke at length about his desire to get attention. Reminder, this is a judge-only trial. Justice Ann Malloy, out of Manassian's fate,

really rests in her hands. There is no jury. The trial wrapped up the week before Christmas. Judge Malloy spent the next few months in deliberation. I'm just feeling, you know, a little all over the place, a little anxious, if I'm honest, for this thing to be over. I talked to Evan the night before Justice Malloy read her decision. Justice Malloy has addressed the concern, like, is autism on trial? She said, she insists that no, it's not. This is an individual case. But I hope that she understands, like, what is at stake from the

verdict. Like, because a verdict sends a message. So I would hope that Justice Malloy understands what is at stake for the autism community. Today, a judge in Toronto said the man behind the van attack that killed and injured dozens of innocent people knew exactly what he was doing. On March 3rd, 2021, Justice Malloy delivered her verdict over YouTube. She found Manassian guilty on all charges, 10 counts of first-degree murder

and 16 counts of attempted murder. He faces an automatic life sentence, which is expected to be handed down sometime in early 2022. It's unlikely he'll face any additional charges as a result of Amoresh Tesfamiriam's death, which came after the verdict. Malloy dismissed Manassian's NCR defense. Her verdict focused on his desire to achieve fame and notoriety. We can't play Malloy reading it herself, but this is what she said. This accused committed a horrific crime, one of the most devastating tragedies this city has ever endured, for the purpose of achieving fame. I realize that journalists also have conflicting ethical principles to be weighed in the balance. I also know that in this case, long before I started this trial, the name of this accused was all over the media and the internet His name is also published in several previous decisions I have written in this case

There is nothing I can do to rewind all of that All I can do is to refuse to actually name the accused in my reasons for judgment. It is my hope that his name would no longer be published by anyone else either. This is not an order I will make. It's merely a wish, perhaps a naive one. However, for purposes of this decision, I will refer to the accused as John Doe. She also expressed regret that the trial had given Manassian exactly what he wanted. Kathy Riddell agrees.

The less we cover it and the less attention they get, the better off society will be as a whole. That's my opinion on that. I just, I can't see, I can't see society winning when these guys get the fame and attention that they want. Manassian wanted fame and to be recognized for his actions. And for Judge Malloy, that desire trumped any other motivation. It seemed odd to me that in her comments,

the judge seemed to say that it wasn't necessarily insultdom that motivated him so much as a desire for notoriety and for fame. Laura Bates paid close attention to the Manassian trial. She doesn't believe that insultdom and fame-seeking are mutually exclusive. It seemed really odd to me that she didn't recognize that those two things are inextricably connected and that so much of this community is about performing, if you like, to your kind of fellow community members

and that the entirety of being an incel is about that. It's about inciting rebellion and uprising in others and that he said that when he was arrested. He said that he hoped to inspire others. Alec Manassian had steeped himself in some of the darkest parts of the internet. Incels, the alt-right, trolls, misogyny, racism. He spent his time on sites that celebrate mass murder and kill counts. Sites that call Elliot Rodger and other murderers saints. Research has shown that the manosphere is becoming larger and more interconnected and more extreme in its rhetoric. And that's just how the Internet works.

It's constant one-upmanship. So are we really surprised that a community of young men who believe they've been cast aside by society might seek the admiration of one another instead? Manassian told psychiatrists that he wanted to be celebrated on these forums the way Roger had been. And that's exactly what happened. Looking at the way in which these forums then described him as a saint and the impact that he had on them, which is what he wanted, the idea that you could kind of unravel that and say, oh, no, he just wanted to have kind of

notoriety. So it wasn't about the incel thing. That seemed really odd to me, especially considering that the judge herself also described him as being obsessed with Elliot Rodger. For Laura, the binary between fame-seeking murderer and incel is false. The nihilism at the heart of inceldom, the black pill, it can cause some young men to turn inward. In their words, they L-D-A-R, lay down and rot. They give up. But that nihilism can also turn outward. Because if my life has no value, why should yours?

Manassian told doctors he wanted to achieve notoriety for the attack. He also told them that if he could have thought of a place where he could have killed only women, that's where he would have gone. But he couldn't. So he chose Yonge Street. So he chose Yonge Street. Sometimes, when I tell someone I've been working on a story about Alec Manassian, I get this blank stare. And I have to remind them, you know, the van attack, the guy who ran down all those pedestrians in Toronto, before they clue in.

And this is in Toronto before they clue in. And this is in Toronto. We get so much information about these incomprehensibly awful, brutally violent events so quickly and so often that even here, the van attack is starting to feel distant. But not for Evan. Do you have it clear in your head that it's not your fault? Yes, many people have told me that it's not my fault over the years. How do you feel? How do I feel? I've listened to them in a literal sense. I've heard them say it's not my fault. They've told me, this one girl I was dating shortly after I moved to Toronto, I told her about it and she said, you can't beat yourself up for something like that. His problems were so deep and so complex and you weren't even that close with him at that point. So there is nothing you could have done.

so deep and so complex and you weren't even that close with him at that point so there is nothing you could have done so he reached out to a group of you guys do you have any theories around why he did that or maybe he was trying one last time to feel normal like to feel like he had friends. That's the only plausible theory I could come up with. Maybe he was trying to, you know, save. But I don't like to think about that theory. But if he was

reaching out to us to try and feel normal, if that theory is true, then that would be terrible. Because that would be terrible because that would mean that it actually is our fault we may have let him down and then that's the point where my anxiety would get triggered and it is getting triggered now because now it forces me to contemplate that we are responsible for the deaths of 10 people evan by proxy you're not responsible for this okay

evan look at me that's not your fault okay thanks you know that I do I just don't like to consider that maybe it is I've spent the last few years thinking about Alec Manassian And as satisfying as it would be to point a finger At one moment in the story where someone Anyone could have intervened. I'm not sure that moment exists. I don't know if there's anything that anyone could have done. In the months leading up to the attack, Alec reached out to Evan and a few other former

classmates from high school. They've all been left to carry the weight of these unanswerable questions. Could I have stopped this? What if I had just written him back? It feels profoundly unfair. Personally, I think things would have worked out exactly the same. Alec was immersed in hate. Exchanging a few Facebook messages wouldn't have amounted to anything Since Judge Malloy's verdict, Alec Manassian has denied all media requests In the three years I've been following this story, I've made several interview requests through Manassian's attorneys And they've all been turned down

I've also reached out to Alec's family. They've said they won't consider talking until after sentencing. Well, I found out on Saturday that he wants to talk to me. I kind of froze up. I'm like, oh God, he wants to speak to me. But Alec does want to speak to Evan. For now, Evan has decided not to speak to Alec. How are you feeling about it? Well, you know, even though it's been almost three years, I can't think of, I have no clue what I can possibly say to him. Like, because, you know, I can't say anything to make things better for him

because that's impossible. I just, I don't even know how to ask him what happened. Because how can you ask someone, hey, how is your mind warped by incels on the internet? I don't know what to say to him. I don't know how to say it. All I know is that he wants to talk. Yeah, but why do you think he wants to talk to you? Probably because, you know,

he's the guy who wants notoriety. Alec wants the incel mission statement to be out in the world and he wants, you know, to be a celebrity for the wrong reasons. I can't give that to him. And I won't give that to him. The decision to use Alec Manassian's name and to discuss him as much as we have wasn't an easy one.

It's not something I took lightly. I completely understand why Cathy Riddell doesn't want to hear his name, and I respect why Judge Malloy kept it from her verdict. But there is an equally strong case for naming him. I think it's incredibly complicated, but I think that when it comes to this particular issue, you kind of have to weigh up what's happening already that there are entire web pages devoted to so-called incel

saints there are entire platforms that are all about emulating and copying these men that already exists within these subcultures they are already revered and they are already very, very actively and successfully reaching out to and grooming boys to take part. So this is more about creating the mainstream recognition that has to happen if we're going to get counter-terror organizations, governments, police forces, and educators to recognize this threat for what it is. We can't do that without talking about it. We can't make parents aware of the threat without talking about it. One of the producers I work with on this show made an offhand comment about traffic fatalities the other day. How we've collectively agreed that a certain number of deaths every year are an acceptable loss for the convenience of being able to get around pretty easily. And the thing that terrifies

me is that somewhere along the way, we've agreed that things like the Manosphere and the van attack are just acceptable losses, that we're still so enamored by this utopian vision from 30 years ago of a free and unmoderated internet, that we're unwilling to admit that maybe we need some speed limits. There isn't any other job where we'd expect people to walk to work whilst people are screaming at them that they'd like to rape them and these are the different weapons that they'll use to slice them open with so why should we expect that of women who happen to do their jobs online and happen to be working in this area i think what we have to say is that this is utterly unacceptable and more than anything else we need to see social media platforms held to account for stopping it because the idea that

these platforms are just unavoidably a sewer of filth and hatred and intersectional abuse and there's nothing anyone can do about it because that's just human nature is ridiculous and it's offensive and I just don't buy that you know these are companies that in some cases have income bigger than a small country of course you could tackle this if you really wanted to if you took it really seriously you could throw money at it you could train thousands of human moderators, you could change your processes to actually privilege the protection of minorities on your platform over the number of clicks and likes that you get. But unfortunately, the will isn't necessarily there yet. So I think we have to keep

pushing for that and focusing on that and saying this is horrific and it should never become normal. It should never be something that women just learn how to deal with. A federal grand jury has levied charges against a 21-year-old self-identified incel. A suspect is in custody this morning after a shooting at an Arizona shopping mall. Call your Tonsha. The police were alerted to an active shooter at the L.A. Fitness. The note expressed anger at hot cheerleaders and admiration for L.A. Fitness. In Tallahassee, Florida, where two women were shot dead at a yoga studio

by a far-right extremist and self-proclaimed... Police say six of the eight victims killed in the Atlanta spa shootings last night were Asian women. The suspect has told police that he is what they call an incel, someone who's involuntarily... That buzzing I mentioned earlier, it used to come and go. I'd be horrified by some terrible event.

And then it would fade. The man police say stabbed a mother and injured an infant in a Marcus Drive parking lot on June 3rd. It appears Beerly posted dozens of misogynistic and racist videos on YouTube. But then I started working on this series. I spent years trying to understand Alec Manassian. I saw the scale of the manosphere and how many young guys had been red-pilled. I saw how seductive, insultome, and other toxic ideologies can be. And how misogyny has become so deeply embedded in almost all of us.

...learned that investigators found white supremacist literature in potential... And so today the charges against the 17-year-old male suspect in the February stabbing at a Toronto massage parlor were upgraded. At some point, I realized that this wasn't just a story about an act of violence that happened to other people. It's a story about a form of violence that feels like it's getting closer and closer to me, to any of us. But especially if you're a woman. And honestly, I'm scared. I'm scared.

A special thanks to all of the survivors and residents of Willowdale who generously shared their stories with us. And our condolences to the families of those who were killed in the Toronto van attack. Boys Like Me was created by me, Ellen Chloe Bateman. This series is produced by me, Chris McEnroe, Scott Dobson, and Michael Catano. Michael Catano is our head writer. Additional production by Evan Mead. Michael Catano is our head writer. Additional production by Evan Mead. Eunice Kim is our associate producer.

Emily Connell is our digital producer. Sound design by Michael Catano. Chris Oak is our story editor. And Evan Agard is our video producer. Artwork by Ben Shannon. Damon Fairless is our senior producer. The executive producer of CBC Podcasts is Arif Noorani. And Leslie Merklinger is CBC Podcasts executive director. Special thanks to Dave Downey, Cecil Fernandez, Andrea Morales, Lauda Antonelli, Julia Whitman, Joanna Landsberg, Amanda Cox, Carol Off, Michelle Shepard, Brendan Hughes,

the CBC Reference Library, Radio Archives, and Visual Resources. Additional audio courtesy of The Guardian UK, BBC News, City TV, CHCH, The Hill, Fox News, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Charlotte Observer, KRON, ABC News, 12 News, Democracy Now!, Sudbury.com, Today, and CBS News. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.